Week One of the -ity Experiment

Week One:
I decided to make a list of all the -ity words I could come up with:
charity, responsibility, integrity, accountability, fidelity, civility, nobility, humility, dignity, generosity, respectability, community, creativity, opportunity, curiosity, productivity, affinity, diversity, humanity, infinity, luminosity, necessity, equality, identity, reality, personality, tenacity, continuity, and insanity (we are so not going there!).

Next, I went to Google and looked up the suffix-ity. Google sent me to www.wordinfo.info/words where I found the following information.

"Latin: suffix used to form abstract nouns expressing act, state, quality, property, or condition corresponding to an adjective)"

There I found 18 pages of -ity words, many of which I either can't spell or pronounce, or they don't apply to the purpose of this blog. I did find sagacity, (which has possibilities) seniority ( getting there too fast as it is), and a really fun one - pecuniosity. It means: "The state or fact of being supplied with money." Now that is a fun -ity word that I am sure many of us would have no qualms about trying to develop! Serendipity was listed: "an accidental or chance discovery." Pseudoserendipity showed up as well: "A description of accidental discoveries of ways to achieve an end sought for, in contrast to the meaning of (true) serendipity, which describes accidental discoveries of things not sought for."

I had fun learning new -ity words, but I am not interested in developing a talent for sesquipedality ("The practice of using abnormally long words"). My goal is to develop states of being for myself that will bring me closer to who I really am: A daughter of a Heavenly Father who loves me. A child of God. A spiritual Being having a mortal experience. I am reminded that no matter how many big words I learn, it always circles back to the basics of the gospel: Faith, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost, obedience and enduring to the end. Developing those virtuous -ity qualities described by Bishop Burton will help me achieve my goal.

So, where do I begin? What -ity do I choose first? I'll narrow it down to the first 10 I listed earlier: responsibility, integrity, accountability, fidelity, civility, nobility, humility, dignity, generosity, charity. I moved charity to the end of the list because the Bible Dictionary describes charity as "The highest, noblest, strongest kind of love, not merely affection; the pure love of Christ. it is never used to denote alms or deed or benevolence, although it may be a prompting motive." 2 Nephi teaches us that if we have not charity, we are nothing...so I am hoping that as I come to develop the other nine -ity qualities, I will be more prepared to understand the concept of true charity.

Tomorrow...responsibility.